Thoughts about Tennis Tradition...

[don_budge]

The Illusionary…Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"... What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory." -- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

[don_budge]

#3,000…and counting…for Frankie and Dylan and my Love for the Game

Underhitting? Overhitting? For any given situation there is a correct shot to be played within the context of your own game versus your opponent's game. How does one arrive at that decision and then how does one go about execution of that shot? Play lots and lots of matches…practice and otherwise.

Basically you have three situations when you are a student of the game and learning to be a tennis player. You have practice, playing while practicing and match play.

When you are practicing you are sorting out your technical thoughts and giving in to the process of analysis. At the same time you are trying to acquire "feel" which is in reality how this game was meant to be played. All of the endless discussions and thoughts about how to, have to somehow dissipate and become simply a feeling about how things are to be accomplished. When you are practicing I think that the average human being has room for just about one swing thought…maybe two if they are exceptionally intelligent. Practice something until you master it…so that you can do it without thinking. Just doing it. Just feeling it.

Learn to play coming from behind and learn to play when you have the lead. Get used to the "feeling" that comes when being behind and plotting your way back into a match. Get used to the "feeling" of trying to close out an opponent. When practicing while playing there isn't much room for thought for a lot of technical stuff…just get the feet in position and watch the ball…racquet back early. Think about preparation perhaps. Make it your mantra...

A milestone. A tiny one in the big picture. In the general scope of things. It's only me thinking…out loud.

But I think that I have managed to paint a picture. I could call it…"The Year in Tennis"…2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and now 2015. I could call it…"The Three Little Dots"…connecting the past with the present and into the future. Out of it I came up with a paradigm to teach by…you know the one.

Bill Tilden is the book. Richard Gonzales is the model with the J. Donald Budge backhand. Harry Hopman is the coach. Roger Federer is the living proof.

Make of it what you will…or don't if it doesn't suit you. That is the point afterall…every coach must come up with a paradigm. A paradigm that is rigid enough to adhere to certain fundamentals yet flexible enough to connect the past with the present. Flexible enough to understand that every single student is unique. I was at a trainer's seminar here recently in Sweden and a question was asked of the speaker…what is it that is most important that a trainer should bring to the court?

I will tell you what that is…every coach should endeavor to be a student of the game. No small feat these days with the propaganda and the hype. It's hard to separate the nonsense from the real thing. Modern tennis…and modern times. Tennis metaphorically morphing into life.

What a great pleasure it is to participate in this little neighbourhood of ours. I guess that I have made it my personal playground. I know that I have. For me…it's therapy. It's therapy against the reality of things. The truth is that life isn't all that great. Not for a lot of people. But we tennis coaches and players and students…we are lucky to have such a game to play. Somehow it found us and we become a part of it. It's a living thing…made up of you and I and everyone that has ever found the love of the game through the racquet meeting the ball in sweet spot of the strings. That's love…I can tell you.

Love is a tricky thing. It's a two way street. You get what you give…sometimes you get more than you bargained for. When I first started playing the game I never imagined this. For God's sake…I was privileged to spend two whole summers with J. Donald Budge himself. How did that happened? I was a poor kid from a broken home. I guess the game was finding me. For some reason I was privileged to meet Aaron Krickstein and his family and this gave me another wonderful insight into the game. How did that happen? I'm lucky I guess.

Along the way I took my tennis racquet with me wherever I went. Today it is paying my bills and putting food on the table. The game has been a gift to me. So I got a lot of love out of it…so I feel that I have to give it back. Maybe that seems strange…a strange thought to some of you. But you understand just how much I love the game. I love it enough to defend it as if it was a she and she was the love of my life. I live in a world of make believe…where I am the hero. Like don_quixote falling in love with a whore or defending the world from gigantic windmills.

Love is a tricky thing. I already said that didn't I. We don't deserve it. Therefore it is impossible to find. But I have found it…in a couple of places. Women? It seems that they come and go and so does our love for them. Not always…I suppose true love exists. I love where the fire never goes out. But the love that I found is the love of a dog. Not to mention the love of God. But the love of my dog has been a little heaven on earth. I lost Frankie the American Chocolate Labrador Retriever three days before Christmas last year and then my beloved Wolf Boy went down the day before my birthday in March and he was dead in five days. I lost. I lost big time. A loser of the biggest magnitude.

I was asking myself…where's the bottom? I was falling…at a speed that I was unfamiliar with. The truth is there is no bottom. That's what I found out. The truth is it is a hole…a bottomless hole. Sometimes whether you like it or not…you just keep falling. But you have to stop yourself…nobody else can.

The day the wolf went down was a day that being a student of the game of tennis helped me to understand. If not understand…it helped me to process. In March I was still numb from the loss of Frankie. I couldn't speak for a week…but I wrote here. On that day in March I went to work as normal…it was a Thursday. When I came home the light was on in the stable…which isn't normal. The hair on my neck prickled just a bit. I went in the stable and there was my wife with one of the horses who was having a bout of colic…which can actually be fatal. I went in the house to change clothes and I found Dylan, the wolf, more or less debilitated. I couldn't reach him. I went back to the stable and told my wife and she was very surprised. Dylan seemed to be ok all day.

We were waiting for the veterinarian to arrive and when she finally did it was a couple of hours of torture. For us and the horse. A four foot hose down the nose of the horse to fill her stomach full of water so she wouldn't dehydrate. Along with some solvent to move her bowels. We had to walk her all night long on the hour. I say we…but it was more or less my wife. But Dylan was not responding.

The next morning I took him to the vet. It Friday the 13th. They gave him some antibiotics for a possible infection and after a couple of hours we were headed home. Later on he seemed to revive. The next day he was trying his best to act as if everything was ok. It was a courageous act. He was to die three days later. I lay on the floor holding him…sobbing.

The irony of everything is that on that Thursday we went to look at a Chocolate Lab puppy. A litter of nine. I picked him out immediately…or did he pick me. I guess that we picked each other. Love at first sight. I named him on the spot…Puntzie. He was nine months old on Monday. He's sleeping at my feet right now.

You live to play another day. You keep your head in the game. It ain't over until match point is in the bag. I am not the same man that I was a year ago. The sun was passing us right about here as I remember. I'm a year older now. A year wiser. Happiness? What is that? Is that the name of the game? Or is it survival.

Love…it's a tricky thing. I quit tennis when I turned forty. I took my first golf lesson on my birthday. I never touched a racquet for some 13 or 14 years. I gave myself to golf. But I move to Sweden almost eleven years ago. I wasn't working for the first three years or so. Then one day…out of the blue. I somehow found myself giving a tennis lesson to a pretty French girl on an old and pretty much dilapidated court at the golf club. A couple of guys came walking by after finishing their round. One of them was my neighbour. Another was a man on the board of a local tennis club…they were looking for a tennis trainer. I got the call. The game came to me…again. That was about eight years ago. I began my career as a tennis teacher.

I found tennisplayer.net doing a search for a video of the J. Donald Budge backhand. One of my earliest students also turned out to be my best. Gustaf was switching from two hands to one. I never knew that there was a forum for the first year or so. When I first found it…I marvelled at bottle's writing. I even asked him about writing. He told me that you must know your audience.

When I first started writing here on the forum I mentioned Bill Tilden in one of my posts. Wouldn't you know it that GeoffWilliams was banging on me like I couldn't believe. In my world Tilden has always been discussed openly…without the distraction of his unfortunate personal life. I erased all of my posts that I had written to that point and called it quits. But then I thought it over. Nobody is chasing me away. Nobody. I will leave when it is time. My time is coming…it's coming sooner than later. But it's been fun. In a way you guys are some of the best friends that I ever had.

I dedicate my 3,000th post that I wrote to my beloved friends Frankie and Dylan. Puntzie too…can't forget the living. I dedicate it to my love for the game. To life. From the bottom of my heart. All of it. All 3,004. I did it for my students and you guys too…of course.

[gzhpcu]

Talking about the old days:



Kramer and Schroeder playing doubles on a grass court. Look how everything peaceful looks as opposed to today's tournament courts plastered with advertising.

[stotty]

Puzzled...

I quit tennis when I turned forty. I took my first golf lesson on my birthday. I never touched a racquet for some 13 or 14 years.

I really liked your post. It's nice you show your heart. What I find hard to understand, given you complete love for tennis, is how you could walk away from the game for so long? Did you feel differently about the game at that point in time? It seems from some of you previous posts that you didn't watch too much tennis either during those years either.

I feel differently about the game now compared to when I was younger. I could have walked away at one point but never did. Tennis saved me because I was poorly educated and left school before the age of 16. I had no other skills. In the end I turned to coaching as a way of making a living. I learned to love it...at first I didn't. I love tennis much more now. One, I am incredibly grateful for what it has enabled me to do. Two, for some reason I find tennis more interesting than before. I discovered there is much more to it than I thought.

[klacr]

great post don_budge

Congrats on 3,000! You'd be an all-star and hall of famer in MLB if your reach that many hits.

Tennis is a special sport. It brings you in, tosses you out, sucks you back in, swirls you around and creates an entire life for you if you accept it.

I have my moments with tennis. Love the sport and the teaching and nuances of it. Business side gets a bit hairy sometimes. The tennis politics at times even more hairy. But in my humble opinion, I've played and competed in all those sectors well.

Will tennis always be a part of my life. YES. Will it always be my business and career? Not sure. But that's the exciting part.

keep up the posts don_budge. Your opinions and insights give this forum the breadth and depth that keeps me coming back. Agree or disagree with your posts does not matter. It's the purpose and heart at which we are willing to write the posts that resonate.
Everyone has a purpose.
We all have to figure it out...

https://youtu.be/2X8fQD3CL5I

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[don_budge]

Strange Days…In Paris

Last year I was sitting in this cafe in Paris at this time and this beautiful woman and her man were eating next to the Ugly American and I. This Dutch dude was at our table too. He had ridden down to Paris from Amsterdam on the same train as us and was staying at the same hotel as we were. It was right down the street from the Arc d'Triumph. Somehow he ended up in the room that we originally were going to stay in. Instead we got a balcony view of the Arc…down the Champs Elysses. Still…somehow our journeys were connected.

http://www.grayline.com/tours/paris/dinner-on-the-champs-elysees-seine-river-cruise-and-illuminations-night-tour-5875_25/

The little cafe was Italian cuisine. The beautiful woman was of Italian descent. She was friends with the owners of the cafe. Her man was a passionate tennis person…my buddy and I had been to Roland Garros during the day. He didn't seem to mind in the least that his beautiful companion was totally engaging with me. He seemed to be sympathetic. I told him about the old guy twirling the wooden tennis racquet on the Roland Garros grounds. I introduced myself as don_budge, an American transplanted in Sweden. I'd seen her walking down the street and she said she had seen me too, we started discussing George Orwell, tennis and over-sized racquets, immigration in Europe, political correctness, love and life…you know, typical conversation for a Paris cafe. The Parisian hour. In the middle of our conversation three machine gun armed soldiers walked right by us. I was like…what the fuck?

"Well", they said…"there have been problems in Paris." Several months later…well you know the rest.

Strange days…Jim Morrison

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb0MF1UnD3o

[don_budge]

My Favorite Tennis Poster...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/c0/73/69/c073690836ae959eba45fd39b4b2b51f.jpg

Surprised?

[gzhpcu]

Griping about the "Good Old Days" is nothing new....

https://news.google.com/newspapers?n...5,512374&hl=en

Then it was about "now a player can fly so quickly from one tournament to another"...

Nothing is more responsible for the good old days then a bad memory

Franklin Pierce Adams

[bottle]

"The older I get, the better I used to be."-- John McEnroe as reported by Clifton Matthews at the beginning of his concert in Winston-Salem. Clifton Matthews is the mentor of genius piano players at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

[curiosity]

The old days of tennis? Banging the ball on green lawns or asphalt is an innovation invented practically yesterday.

Tennis has been evoking waves of sentiment and retrospection for more than 500 years. We know that even in Shakespeare's time tennis in varied forms had been well established for more than 100 years. In renaissance Italy the tennis court had low walls, a net, no roof, and the players used racquets to hit a cloth ball stuffed with compressed fur or hair. The Italian game as evidenced in art appears to have been more like the modern game, perhaps, than Réal tennis as played in Shakespeare's England (or, if you like, today in Newport, RI.)

We know with certainty the identity of only a few of the books which Shakespeare had read. Among those few is "The Book of the Courtier" by Baldesar Castiglione. Published by Aldo in Venice in 1528 it quickly became famous, a sort of bible of conduct in renaissance courts. It was translated into English by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561. The game of tennis referred to in the book can be seen in representation at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, via a painting by Herri de Bles (c. 1480-1550). Shakespeare himself was wont to take swords seriously and make light of tennis as something a regular part of upper class life, but for leisure.

In about the year 1508, when attached to the court of the Duke of Urbino, Baldasar Castiglione recorded a series of remarkable conversations among the courtiers, a collection of some of the most prominent men and women in renaissance Italy. At one point Count Ludovico da Canossa remarked, in considering the virtues a man at Court should have, that he needed to be fit, strong, and skilled with weapons. Noting that various exercises or sports were suitable to condition a Courtier for more serious endeavors, the Count remarked "another noble exercise and most suitable for a man at court is the game of tennis which shows off the disposition of the body, the quickness and litheness of all its parts, and all the qualities that are brought out by almost every other exercise." So too, in this series of transcribed dialogues Federico, Duke of Montefeltro, noted that "the game of tennis also is almost always played in public, and is one of those spectacles to which the presence of a crowd lends great attraction. Therefore I would have our Courtier engage in it (and in all other exercises except Arms) as in something which is not his profession, and in which he will make it evident that he does not seek or expect any praise; nor let it appear that he devotes much effort or time to it, even though he may do it ever so well."

The association of swords and tennis goes back quite a way. I am reminded of a well known photograph of Mats Wilander seated in his hallway, épée in hand.

Second Part of King Henry IV: Prince Henry speaking , Act II, Scene II.
"But that the tennis-court-keeper knows better than I; for it is a low ebb of
linen with thee when thou keepest not racket there; as thou hast
not done a great while, because the rest of thy low countries
have made a shift to eat up thy holland."

Even in Shakespeare's day it was possible to overdo tennis as a hobby/, turning it from good exercise to bad dissipation, as indicated in Hamlet, Act II. Scene I. As Polonious said, in suggesting how
one may belittle another man's reputation:
"He closes thus: 'I know the gentleman.
I saw him yesterday, or t'other day,
Or then, or then, with such or such; and, as you say,
There was 'a gaming; there o'ertook in's rouse;
There falling out at tennis'; or perchance,
'I saw him enter such a house of sale,'
Videlicet, a brothel, or so forth."

and elsewhere, in answer to a question as to what has happened to an old man's beard:
Prin. Hath any man seene him at the Barbers?
Clau. No, but the Barbers man hath beene seen with
him, and the olde ornament of his cheeke hath alreadie
stuft tennis balls.

[bottle]

I was adored once too.

[bottle]

Hast broke my head acrosst and given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too.

[curiosity]

Hast broke my head acrosst and given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too.

Twelth Night, Act 5, Scene 1

"AGUECHEEK. For the love of God, a surgeon!
Send one presently to Sir Toby.
OLIVIA. What's the matter?
AGUECHEEK. Has broke my head across, and has given Sir Toby a
bloody coxcomb too. For the love of God, your help! I had rather
than forty pound I were at home.
OLIVIA. Who has done this, Sir Andrew?
AGUECHEEK. The Count's gentleman, one Cesario. We took him for a
coward, but he's the very devil incardinate."

Assumptions have consequences often unpredictable as to good or ill.

[don_budge]

The very foundations of life (tennis)...

The very foundations of life, as Dostoevsky saw it, were being thereby shaken loose and the whole structure was beginning to sway underfoot. Those old enough to have been raised before the disorder set in still managed somehow to maintain their footing by sheer habit. But the young stumbled, fell, and tried desperately to discover new ways of keeping their balance. Many of them, however, were only too willing to crawl and scatter in search of the nearest cracks and holes to take refuge in dank darkness.

So it stands to reason that if you were not fully cognizant and aware by the time the year "1984" one would have a difficult time discerning all that transpires today under the guise of truth.

[don_budge]

Aldous Huxley…Brave New World 1959

"It seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods." -- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World 1959


The Presidential Reality Show...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAH6klFQwiM

I pity the children. The poor children.